Australian Women's Masters: Gu Xiaobing Leads With 5/5

The Australian Women's Masters is taking place at Melbourne Chess Club as part of celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Club. Prior to it, the facility has hosted 2016 Australian Chess Championship won by Kanan Izzat.

This year the Women's Masters is held for the 4th time and the field, according to the organizers, is much stronger than before. The main tournament is a round-robin of 10 rounds.

After 5 rounds, Chinese WGM Gu Xiaobing is leading with a perfect score, but IM Deimante Daulyte is only half a point behind. See the current standings at chess-results.com, and also the tournament bulletins attached below.

These days, grandmasters Murtas Kazhgaleyev and Rustam Khusnutdinov of Kazakhstan, as well as Russian GM Vasily Papin, are in Australia on a tour. The GMs trio have already won the round-robin event in Melbourne, the strongest tournament ever held in the city.

3 rounds are over in the Australian Open which is under way in the suburb of Sydney. So far, 6 players have got the perfect score: Ni Hua, Murtas Kazhgaleyev, Eugene Schon, Steven Yap Kim, Gregory Canfell, and the incumbent Australian champion Max Illingworth. A group of 12 players including 5 GMs have 2.5/3 (see complete current standings).

The young Russian player Alexandra Goriachkina convincingly won the traditional international women tournament, Rector's Cup of the Law Academy which took place in Kharkov, Ukraine. Goriachkina scored 7/9, a point and a half ahead of her rivals. The winner with already a long list of successes, is only 13 years old.

In the interview to Russian sports newspaper Sport-Express (in Russian), Anatoly Karpov claims sensationally that back in 1989, he has got a proposal to lose his Candidates final match vs Jan Timman (1990) on purpose.

The Hasselbacken Chess Open ended in Stockholm. With over 300 entrants the names of most players are fairly unknown, but the list of top rated players was impressive: Dmitry Andreikin, Alexei Shirov, Zoltan Almasi and others.